New York Times Publishes Bi-Weekly Article from ‘The Onion’

What else could it be when the Time’s new ombudsman Clark Hoyt prints a laughable correction account story about having been scooped and downright embarrassed multiple times by conservative bloggers on some of the years biggest stories concerning scandal of the liberal Democrat (i.e. OBAMA) persuasion. (H/T Michelle Malkin) Be prepared, the ombudsman column is a bi-weekly event and from what we can tell it reads exactly like the made up stories from The Onion.

According to Hoyt it was a “slow response” when they failed to report on the removal or even the outing of Barack Obama’s 9/11 truther and communist green czar Van Jones. This admission of lazy journalism was embedded in an even bigger admission that the Times completely omitted most of the key facts about the James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles exposure of ACORN’s willingness to facilitate a slave trading child prostitution ring from El Salvador.

ON Sept. 12, an Associated Press article inside The Times reported that the Census Bureau had severed its ties to Acorn, the community organizing group. Robert Groves, the census director, was quoted as saying that Acorn, one of thousands of unpaid organizations promoting the 2010 census, had become “a distraction.”

What the article didn’t say — but what followers of Fox News and conservative commentators already knew — was that a video sting had caught Acorn workers counseling a bogus prostitute and pimp on how to set up a brothel staffed by under-age girls, avoid detection and cheat on taxes. The young woman in streetwalker’s clothes and her companion were actually undercover conservative activists with a hidden camera.

It was an intriguing story: employees of a controversial outfit, long criticized by Republicans as corrupt, appearing to engage in outrageous, if not illegal, behavior. An Acorn worker in Baltimore was shown telling the “prostitute” that she could describe herself to tax authorities as an “independent artist” and claim 15-year-old prostitutes, supposedly illegal immigrants, as dependents.

But for days, as more videos were posted and government authorities rushed to distance themselves from Acorn, The Times stood still. Its slow reflexes — closely following its slow response to a controversy that forced the resignation of Van Jones, a White House adviser — suggested that it has trouble dealing with stories arising from the polemical world of talk radio, cable television and partisan blogs. Some stories, lacking facts, never catch fire. But others do, and a newspaper like The Times needs to be alert to them or wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself.

Seriously, Hoyt should quit now; as far as I know he might still have credibility.

Just One Minute put’s this farcical excuse into perspective (proving once again that conservative bloggers are now scooping the Time’s excuses for being such a piss poor excuse of a newspaper).

Let’s see, does anyone think the Times does a poor job of covering stories that are getting wild attention from the Huffington Post, the Daily Kos, Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann? That is not my experience – it’s old times, but the Times went all-in with the most extreme charge in the Jeff Gannon/Valerie Plame flare-up, based on “research” from the Daily Kos that didn’t make sense and didn’t hold up.

That is a bit of a weak start for Hoyt – the perceived problem is not that the Times passes over all the partisan media, it is that the Times ignores the right-wing media. Dare we mention John Edwards, Charles Freeman, and Eason Jordan?

Hoyt writes of Missing Cities:

The Times quoted a statement by Bertha Lewis, Acorn’s chief executive, saying that the two activists, James O’Keefe, 25, and Hannah Giles, 20, spent months visiting Acorn offices in San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami and Philadelphia before getting the responses they wanted. But the article left out one city Lewis cited: New York [link]. Between the time of her statement and the publication of the article, a new video surfaced, featuring an Acorn worker in Brooklyn advising Giles to bury money from prostitution in a tin.

Some readers saw a deliberate effort by the paper to help Lewis out of a tight spot. Scott Shane, the reporter, said he had been unable to reach Lewis and felt that including New York among the cities she mentioned would have implied unfairly that she was lying, something for which he had no evidence. He said he thought it was unlikely that employees in New York would inform her of their misconduct before the video appeared. I think he should have included New York.

My goodness – why not just run the allegation about New York, then, with an explanation that the ACORN exec may have been misinformed. Maybe Times readers are adults capable of making their own choice as to whether she was lying or in the dark?

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